I was using Netscape Navigator 2.x with AOL in 1996. I remember because it was a big deal that AOL finally got 32bit winsock support for windows 95. Netscape was definitely out in 1995 as well. I remember "best vieweed with netscape" buttons on websites when I first got on AOL in 1995.
Are you talking about a specific browser version? Like Netscape Communicator 4.0 ?
Both Internet Explorer and Netscape were available in 1996. IE was based on NCSA Mosaic.
If this were applied in general, search engines, video and blog sites, and anyone hosting a message board/forum would have to shut their sites down. It's stupid and shows a judge that hasn't got a clue how the Internet works. IF they should go after anyone, it should be the poster of the content not the service providers.
For basic functionality Postgres and MySQL have equivalent functionality. Postgres is starting to catch up with replication and I suspect it will be better than MySQL's. However, it wouldn't kill the Postgres guys to add a few things to make it easier for MySQL users to migrate. The *gres types are very anal about standards and I'd agree that MySQL has done some user friendly but craptastic things to their SQL dialect. Why not make a standard package of mysql wrappers written as procedures or something with postgres that users can enable?
I just migrated a web app from MySQL 4.1 to Postgres 9.0. The worst part was differences with dates and the pickyness of postgres with joins. In postgres or ingres, the order of joins matters and group by/order by/having and distinct are subtly different.
Conversely, I saw a lot of strange problems at my previous employer with Percona when they migrated from MySQL 5.0. We had a lot of queries act up, weird sort orders, etc. It wasn't a deal breaker, but it was a nightmare for QA and developers to get the app ported in a week. Half the bugs were database related.
I'm sticking with MySQL for my own projects. 5.5 is rather nice.
gettimeofday calls are a problem for several applications. Postgres and MySQL both had to do some changes to lower the number of times they were called to speed up performance. The problem is that open source software is often designed for Linux. gettimeofday is cheap on Linux because they chose to use a less precise timer than other operating systems. I'm not certain how fast it is in Solaris, but I doubt it's a speed demon. This is a software problem though. The best solution is to update a shared memory segment with the value periodically and just read that from libc. It's a pain to implement though.
I think the argument the GP was making was that less cores means less contention for the lock. Combine that with a faster chip and it is faster. They would need to rewrite large portions of the database to get away from needing mutex. There are other locking strategies as well as ways to write structures that can be read all the time. Some databases are designed to be lock free like couchdb. The problem there is that it's NOSQL and assumes you want to version things and never delete.
Databases are usually lock intensive and many try to do row level locks rather than table locks now.
Intel added instructions to the CPU that can be used for implementing locking primitives that are much faster. I think they're called CAS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compare-and-swap
It depends which AMD Fusion CPU you buy. An E series might do this, but the faster A series does not. I just bought an A series a few weeks ago and it gets about 3 hours. It's an amazing CPU and faster than I expected for a quad core 1.4Ghz chip. Getting it to work with linux and BSD has been a real pain in the butt though.
Those people would probably buy a laptop or netbook anyway. They use less power. The whole point of a desktop is performance. In the old days, some people liked the form factor. Most people only buy desktops because they don't know better, are avid gamers, content creators or programmers.
Anyone who wants a cheap or energy efficient system shouldn't buy a desktop.
FreeBSD is moving to llvm clang. OpenBSD and NetBSD have put effort into getting pcc working again. DragonFly has embrassed the GPLv3 and put recent GCC in. MirBSD has been experimenting with pcc but I don't know their objective there.
MidnightBSD might switch to llvm but we're evaluating what will be the best objective c solution long term. The real problem is support from the GNU community is limited. Upstreaming patches as a BSD developer is a nightmare. They don't want us as users.
That would fairly test kernels, but not user land. As long as it was taken into account some GNU utilities are tuned for Linux, I think it would be OK to do this. You couldn't say anything but here's a comparison of kernel performance. it would not be a benchmark of FreeBSD as FreeBSD is the kernel + user land.
The FreeBSD developers did a major overhaul on the Kernel starting at 5.0. They introduced fine grained locking into the kernel. Translation: they made it SMP friendly and ready for all the multicore CPUs we have now.
Some developers didn't agree with the work and eventually moved on and that's why we have Dragonfly BSD.
Personally, I think FreeBSD is great. I forked it because I thought it was good but needed work for desktop use. These results don't surprise me entirely, but I do see issues with the benchmark. It could be benchmarking regressions in the newer X server for instance. FreeBSD and MidnightBSD both ship with older versions of X due to Linux people redesigning thinks every minute. We can't keep up. What this benchmark says to me is that the older stuff is good with older video cards.
As far as the linux "emulation" goes, it's not emulation in the same way people think of game emulators or something. It's mostly mapping linux system calls to freebsd system calls and making sure the differences in behavior are handled. (return values and things) There are also many system calls not implemented in FreeBSD that Linux has like epoll or fstat64. You'll notice this right away if you try to run Firefox 6 for linux on FreeBSD. It will work, but depending on the freebsd version, you'll see warnings in the console about the missing system calls. Part of the speed increase might be that some system calls are never run:)
As far as drivers go, if you want them, help with the effort to write them. Linux people can use our code, but we can't use theirs. They're nice enough to write the DRM/DRI code in MIT licensed form so we can use it, but most of the linux kernel is off limits due to the GPLv2.
Let me be clear, when I was talking about price, I was including the fact that I upgraded an existing system with a 6 core CPU rather than buying new RAM + motherboard + CPU to switch to an Intel chip.
There are workloads that AMD chips beat Intel chips. The benchmark mentioned by the other poster is an example. One benchmark does not prove anything, but I'm certainly happy with my purchase.
What I like most about the AMD CPU is that it's great for building packages. I use it occasionally on the MidnightBSD magus cluster and it can run through all of our packages in about 1.5 days using a modest software raid 0 setup. In fact, the system is usually disk bound. I don't have HAMMER + SSD:)
Not only that, but I just heard a piece on NPR about how smart phones are a small percentage of total users in the US. Coverage area is an issue, and I don't know why AT&T said they were buying T-mobile for more coverage. It doesn't make sense.
In my office, I'm one o the few people with a smartphone of any kind. I've seen two androids and i have an iphone. I'm sure the typical age of customer matters too. I know a lot of 40+ people with t-mobile. They don't attract texting and data people who pay a lot fo r plans. Of course at&t can't even provide coverage for them.
I don't believe the bit about 32nm is accurate. I just ordered a new laptop with an AMD A6-3400 CPU. This is a fusion based chip and is 32nm.
As far as the performance claims regarding 6 core AMD chips, I have to agree with that. However, the cost of an Intel chip is not worth it. My 6 core AMD upgrade saved me hundreds of dollars. it still improved my starcraft 2 framerate by double over my phenom 9600 x4.
Intel stuff is faster if you have the money. It's not fanboyism, just practical price/performance based on benchmarks.
This is why the big 3 continue to have a foothold in the desktop space. Here's a hint, if everyone started using a new platform, Adobe would port it or flash would die. Either way, I'm happy.
The only BSD that's impressive about this is OpenBSD. NetBSD and FreeBSD had licenses from Sun for binary "real" java releases that they could later use to bootstrap OpenJDK. The work porting Java initially was awesome, but it was much easier for FreeBSD and NetBSD to move forward with OpenJDK than it was for OpenBSD or DragonFly.
Thanks to the Linuxolator, we could run old linux JDKs and use them to bootstrap the older binary builds and then go from there. Java requires Java to build (or a subset of it). OpenBSD came up with a clever bootstrapping approach.
Also, the FreeBSD ports of JDKs were based on the Solaris code, not the Linux code.
It's great that you made the 10 year anniversary. I'm rather impressed by the quality of the system at this point. It's a lot of work that most people will never understand. (Yeah i run an even less relevant OS project)
Working on Linux isn't the same thing. There are many people that work on Linux. Keeping a smaller project running is a lot more challenging. They had the magic to attract help, but at the Linux levels. I think they'll have something quite usable in some time. I've dug through some of their code and it's quite good in many places.
According to the FAQ, if you replace your motherboard, the upgrade is no longer valid on the chip. It must store the information in the BIOS or at least use an identifier from the BIOS.
It also says you must be running certain versions of Windows 7 to install the upgrade but does not mention if an upgraded system would work in Linux or BSD or any other OS after installation.
I'm interested in a crack for this not to cheat intel out of money, but to activate it from BSD or Linux and to "fix" it myself if I have to swap out motherboards.
I get it. The Google team must have people just out of college in there that never used Netscape. Seriously, this is called Java Applets. They ran in a sandbox too. Netscape 2 or 3 had a bunch of holes in it from escaping the sandbox. It's been done before! Aside from minor security improvements, it's active x too.
Let's find out how insecure it can be. Let adobe write an app for it and then give security researchers a few weeks.
Worst of all, they used C++. LLVM has terrible support for C++. It's getting better, but it's not there yet.
In that case, I say let the linux zealots do wayland but give us X. They are clearly in not-invented-here syndrome. I'm tired of it. More and more free desktop projects are under the GPL. If they want to do wayland, just go in a corner and do it. Don't screw everyone else in the process. By everyone, I mean all non Linux users. (yes even windows users have x-windows servers available)
There is a clear need for non linux people to take leadership in Xorg as well as starting a graphical desktop environment project. There has to be a stable alternative to the crazy shenanigans going on with Gnome, KDE, Wayland and Ubuntu folks.
My complaint isn't the version bump, it's that it behaves differently like a point release or major version. It's NOT Firefox 4. It broke selenium for instance which I use for testing sites at work. There was a fix for it rather quickly, but the fact that pages render differently means it's not the same software and that is why people are pissed. Firefox 4 was EOL and anything that renders like Firefox 4 is not getting patched!
I'm not sure who's fault it is that Opera doesn't seem to work with many javascript libraries. On one hand, Opera being the under dog should work on adding features to match webkit, gecko or IE's feature set to make it easier to port. On the other hand, I find it laziness that some javascript library developers (Dojo for example) won't even take upstream patches or test Opera support properly.
Opera is one of those browsers I want to like, but get hung up on websites not working or weird behavior with it. It's one of the better browsers on BSD or Linux though. I'm not a big fan of the windows version.
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Netscape didn't come out in 1998. Netscape Navigator 3 was out in 1997 for instance http://sillydog.org/narchive/full123.php
I was using Netscape Navigator 2.x with AOL in 1996. I remember because it was a big deal that AOL finally got 32bit winsock support for windows 95. Netscape was definitely out in 1995 as well. I remember "best vieweed with netscape" buttons on websites when I first got on AOL in 1995.
Are you talking about a specific browser version? Like Netscape Communicator 4.0 ?
Both Internet Explorer and Netscape were available in 1996. IE was based on NCSA Mosaic.
Netscape was founded in 1994. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape
If this were applied in general, search engines, video and blog sites, and anyone hosting a message board/forum would have to shut their sites down. It's stupid and shows a judge that hasn't got a clue how the Internet works. IF they should go after anyone, it should be the poster of the content not the service providers.
For basic functionality Postgres and MySQL have equivalent functionality. Postgres is starting to catch up with replication and I suspect it will be better than MySQL's. However, it wouldn't kill the Postgres guys to add a few things to make it easier for MySQL users to migrate. The *gres types are very anal about standards and I'd agree that MySQL has done some user friendly but craptastic things to their SQL dialect. Why not make a standard package of mysql wrappers written as procedures or something with postgres that users can enable?
I just migrated a web app from MySQL 4.1 to Postgres 9.0. The worst part was differences with dates and the pickyness of postgres with joins. In postgres or ingres, the order of joins matters and group by/order by/having and distinct are subtly different.
Conversely, I saw a lot of strange problems at my previous employer with Percona when they migrated from MySQL 5.0. We had a lot of queries act up, weird sort orders, etc. It wasn't a deal breaker, but it was a nightmare for QA and developers to get the app ported in a week. Half the bugs were database related.
I'm sticking with MySQL for my own projects. 5.5 is rather nice.
gettimeofday calls are a problem for several applications. Postgres and MySQL both had to do some changes to lower the number of times they were called to speed up performance. The problem is that open source software is often designed for Linux. gettimeofday is cheap on Linux because they chose to use a less precise timer than other operating systems. I'm not certain how fast it is in Solaris, but I doubt it's a speed demon. This is a software problem though. The best solution is to update a shared memory segment with the value periodically and just read that from libc. It's a pain to implement though.
I think the argument the GP was making was that less cores means less contention for the lock. Combine that with a faster chip and it is faster. They would need to rewrite large portions of the database to get away from needing mutex. There are other locking strategies as well as ways to write structures that can be read all the time. Some databases are designed to be lock free like couchdb. The problem there is that it's NOSQL and assumes you want to version things and never delete.
Databases are usually lock intensive and many try to do row level locks rather than table locks now.
Intel added instructions to the CPU that can be used for implementing locking primitives that are much faster. I think they're called CAS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compare-and-swap
It depends which AMD Fusion CPU you buy. An E series might do this, but the faster A series does not. I just bought an A series a few weeks ago and it gets about 3 hours. It's an amazing CPU and faster than I expected for a quad core 1.4Ghz chip. Getting it to work with linux and BSD has been a real pain in the butt though.
Those people would probably buy a laptop or netbook anyway. They use less power. The whole point of a desktop is performance. In the old days, some people liked the form factor. Most people only buy desktops because they don't know better, are avid gamers, content creators or programmers.
Anyone who wants a cheap or energy efficient system shouldn't buy a desktop.
FreeBSD is moving to llvm clang. OpenBSD and NetBSD have put effort into getting pcc working again. DragonFly has embrassed the GPLv3 and put recent GCC in. MirBSD has been experimenting with pcc but I don't know their objective there.
MidnightBSD might switch to llvm but we're evaluating what will be the best objective c solution long term. The real problem is support from the GNU community is limited. Upstreaming patches as a BSD developer is a nightmare. They don't want us as users.
How about counting !windows && !mac users of netflix instead? BSD has linux emulation.. we can benefit from linux netflix too.
We have the bsdstats project to try to track bsd users. It's only a good sampling of PC-BSD as they install it by default.
The linuxolator in FreeBSD is located here:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/compat/linux/
You can actually see how it's implemented.
That would fairly test kernels, but not user land. As long as it was taken into account some GNU utilities are tuned for Linux, I think it would be OK to do this. You couldn't say anything but here's a comparison of kernel performance. it would not be a benchmark of FreeBSD as FreeBSD is the kernel + user land.
The FreeBSD developers did a major overhaul on the Kernel starting at 5.0. They introduced fine grained locking into the kernel. Translation: they made it SMP friendly and ready for all the multicore CPUs we have now.
Some developers didn't agree with the work and eventually moved on and that's why we have Dragonfly BSD.
Personally, I think FreeBSD is great. I forked it because I thought it was good but needed work for desktop use. These results don't surprise me entirely, but I do see issues with the benchmark. It could be benchmarking regressions in the newer X server for instance. FreeBSD and MidnightBSD both ship with older versions of X due to Linux people redesigning thinks every minute. We can't keep up. What this benchmark says to me is that the older stuff is good with older video cards.
As far as the linux "emulation" goes, it's not emulation in the same way people think of game emulators or something. It's mostly mapping linux system calls to freebsd system calls and making sure the differences in behavior are handled. (return values and things) There are also many system calls not implemented in FreeBSD that Linux has like epoll or fstat64. You'll notice this right away if you try to run Firefox 6 for linux on FreeBSD. It will work, but depending on the freebsd version, you'll see warnings in the console about the missing system calls. Part of the speed increase might be that some system calls are never run :)
As far as drivers go, if you want them, help with the effort to write them. Linux people can use our code, but we can't use theirs. They're nice enough to write the DRM/DRI code in MIT licensed form so we can use it, but most of the linux kernel is off limits due to the GPLv2.
Let me be clear, when I was talking about price, I was including the fact that I upgraded an existing system with a 6 core CPU rather than buying new RAM + motherboard + CPU to switch to an Intel chip.
There are workloads that AMD chips beat Intel chips. The benchmark mentioned by the other poster is an example. One benchmark does not prove anything, but I'm certainly happy with my purchase.
What I like most about the AMD CPU is that it's great for building packages. I use it occasionally on the MidnightBSD magus cluster and it can run through all of our packages in about 1.5 days using a modest software raid 0 setup. In fact, the system is usually disk bound. I don't have HAMMER + SSD :)
Not only that, but I just heard a piece on NPR about how smart phones are a small percentage of total users in the US. Coverage area is an issue, and I don't know why AT&T said they were buying T-mobile for more coverage. It doesn't make sense.
In my office, I'm one o the few people with a smartphone of any kind. I've seen two androids and i have an iphone. I'm sure the typical age of customer matters too. I know a lot of 40+ people with t-mobile. They don't attract texting and data people who pay a lot fo r plans. Of course at&t can't even provide coverage for them.
I don't believe the bit about 32nm is accurate. I just ordered a new laptop with an AMD A6-3400 CPU. This is a fusion based chip and is 32nm.
As far as the performance claims regarding 6 core AMD chips, I have to agree with that. However, the cost of an Intel chip is not worth it. My 6 core AMD upgrade saved me hundreds of dollars. it still improved my starcraft 2 framerate by double over my phenom 9600 x4.
Intel stuff is faster if you have the money. It's not fanboyism, just practical price/performance based on benchmarks.
This is why the big 3 continue to have a foothold in the desktop space. Here's a hint, if everyone started using a new platform, Adobe would port it or flash would die. Either way, I'm happy.
The only BSD that's impressive about this is OpenBSD. NetBSD and FreeBSD had licenses from Sun for binary "real" java releases that they could later use to bootstrap OpenJDK. The work porting Java initially was awesome, but it was much easier for FreeBSD and NetBSD to move forward with OpenJDK than it was for OpenBSD or DragonFly.
Thanks to the Linuxolator, we could run old linux JDKs and use them to bootstrap the older binary builds and then go from there. Java requires Java to build (or a subset of it). OpenBSD came up with a clever bootstrapping approach.
Also, the FreeBSD ports of JDKs were based on the Solaris code, not the Linux code.
It's great that you made the 10 year anniversary. I'm rather impressed by the quality of the system at this point. It's a lot of work that most people will never understand. (Yeah i run an even less relevant OS project)
Working on Linux isn't the same thing. There are many people that work on Linux. Keeping a smaller project running is a lot more challenging. They had the magic to attract help, but at the Linux levels. I think they'll have something quite usable in some time. I've dug through some of their code and it's quite good in many places.
According to the FAQ, if you replace your motherboard, the upgrade is no longer valid on the chip. It must store the information in the BIOS or at least use an identifier from the BIOS.
It also says you must be running certain versions of Windows 7 to install the upgrade but does not mention if an upgraded system would work in Linux or BSD or any other OS after installation.
I'm interested in a crack for this not to cheat intel out of money, but to activate it from BSD or Linux and to "fix" it myself if I have to swap out motherboards.
Yeah it's not like browsers ever have security holes in their APIs... oh wait they do. You're assuming the "HTML5" interface will be secure. I'm not.
I get it. The Google team must have people just out of college in there that never used Netscape. Seriously, this is called Java Applets. They ran in a sandbox too. Netscape 2 or 3 had a bunch of holes in it from escaping the sandbox. It's been done before! Aside from minor security improvements, it's active x too.
Let's find out how insecure it can be. Let adobe write an app for it and then give security researchers a few weeks.
Worst of all, they used C++. LLVM has terrible support for C++. It's getting better, but it's not there yet.
In that case, I say let the linux zealots do wayland but give us X. They are clearly in not-invented-here syndrome. I'm tired of it. More and more free desktop projects are under the GPL. If they want to do wayland, just go in a corner and do it. Don't screw everyone else in the process. By everyone, I mean all non Linux users. (yes even windows users have x-windows servers available)
There is a clear need for non linux people to take leadership in Xorg as well as starting a graphical desktop environment project. There has to be a stable alternative to the crazy shenanigans going on with Gnome, KDE, Wayland and Ubuntu folks.
Not to mention that HTML 5 is a moving target with no clear versions thanks to Google and friends. You can't target a standard that is never complete.
My complaint isn't the version bump, it's that it behaves differently like a point release or major version. It's NOT Firefox 4. It broke selenium for instance which I use for testing sites at work. There was a fix for it rather quickly, but the fact that pages render differently means it's not the same software and that is why people are pissed. Firefox 4 was EOL and anything that renders like Firefox 4 is not getting patched!
I'm not sure who's fault it is that Opera doesn't seem to work with many javascript libraries. On one hand, Opera being the under dog should work on adding features to match webkit, gecko or IE's feature set to make it easier to port. On the other hand, I find it laziness that some javascript library developers (Dojo for example) won't even take upstream patches or test Opera support properly.
Opera is one of those browsers I want to like, but get hung up on websites not working or weird behavior with it. It's one of the better browsers on BSD or Linux though. I'm not a big fan of the windows version.